Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “She compares the deepest wells of depression to gestation, to a time enclosed, a secluded lightlessness in which, unknown and unforced, we grow.”

— Louise Erdrich

202. “At any rate those two, one the shadow of a shadow in the hall and the other a shadow also, an imitation of the ruthless man who’d stolen from the world with careless ease, both poised, caught in time.”

— Louise Erdrich

203. “I think one of the reasons to be here on earth is to finally be who we are, at all times – to know and be predictable to ourselves.”

— Louise Erdrich

204. “I truly think that you can’t go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can’t go and wrestle it to the ground.”

— Louise Erdrich

205. “So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art.”

— Louise Erdrich

206. “The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.”

— Louise Erdrich

207. “Funny how often the Will of God puts a dollar in a pocket, said Dr. Ames.”

— Louise Erdrich

208. “We have these earthly bodies. We don’t know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.”

— Louise Erdrich

209. “Hildegarde stood, scratched her nose, an act for which she must later say a penance.”

— Louise Erdrich

210. “I need a word, a sentence. The door is open. Go.”

— Louise Erdrich

211. “Soon she cried and farted herself to sleep.”

— Louise Erdrich

212. “She was a woman of reserve.”

— Louise Erdrich

213. “The stars were impersonal. But they took human shapes and arranged themselves in orders that conveyed directions to the next life. There was no time where he was going. He’d always thought that inconceivable. For years now he’d understood that time was all at once, back and forth, upside down. As animals subject to the laws of earth, we think time is experience. But time is more a substance, like air, only of course not air. It is in fact a holy element.”

— Louise Erdrich

214. “Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people – political figures, priests, explorers – and not for the real things that happened in these places – the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals. This confusion of the chimookomaanag between the timelessness of the earth and the short span here of mortals was typical of their arrogance.”

— Louise Erdrich

215. “Now is it time to burn the house?”

— Louise Erdrich

216. “It was Sister Hildegarde’s belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life.”

— Louise Erdrich

217. “These are the decisions that I and many other tribal judges try to make. Solid decisions with no scattershot opinions attached. Everything we do, no matter how trivial, must be crafted keenly. We are trying to build a solid base here for our sovereignty.”

— Louise Erdrich

218. “Thomas Wazhashk: I am not sure what study the information about our advancement, financially speaking, was based on. But I will tell you it was faulty. Most of our people live on dirt floors, no electricity, no plumbing. I haul my own water like most Indians in this room. I consider myself advanced only because I read and write. Should I not be an Indian person because I read and write?”

— Louise Erdrich

219. “How close the dead are. One song away from the living.”

— Louise Erdrich

220. “Getting out of bed, out of a chair, changing her position, was like moving furniture.”

— Louise Erdrich

221. “They drew their water from sloughs or tiny springs, lighted their homes with kerosene. Yet here they were, each person, presenting themselves in worn immaculate clothing. As Indians had for generation after generation, they were attempting to understand a white man reading endlessly from a sheaf of papers.”

— Louise Erdrich

222. “Even the most traditional Indians, the ones who’d kept the old ceremonies alive in secret, either had Catholicism beaten into them in boarding school... or they had decided to hedge their bets by adding the saints to their love of the sacred pipe.”

— Louise Erdrich

223. “Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely.”

— Louise Erdrich

224. “It was always what my father called the last leg of the journey. But we did not stop this time. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.”

— Louise Erdrich

225. “My father had bought an ugly new clock, and it was ticking again in the quiet kitchen.”

— Louise Erdrich

226. “It was ancient and had risen from the boiling earth. It had slept, falling dormant in the dust, rising in mist. Tuberculosis had flown in a dizzy rush to unite with warm life. It was in each new world, and every old world. First it loved animals, then it loved people too.”

— Louise Erdrich

227. “Albertine was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself.”

— Louise Erdrich

228. “They remembered volleyball as a laid back backyard barbecue pastime, or a gym requirement. They had no idea how fierce and cool the sport had become, how girls had taken it over.”

— Louise Erdrich

229. “Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice – for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions.”

— Louise Erdrich

230. “But also, he resisted the idea that his endless work, the warmth of his family, and this identity that got him followed in stores and ejected from restaurants and movies, this way he was, for good or bad, was just another thing for a white man to acquire.”

— Louise Erdrich

231. “The people stared through her as though she were invisible until she thought she was, and walked more easily then, just a cloud reflected in a stream.”

— Louise Erdrich

232. “Our souls are tethered by the love of things that cannot last, Agnes wrote, a note in her pocket. But she had sometimes to think the opposite. Our souls are freed – the only problem was that freedom was an open and a lonely space.”

— Louise Erdrich

233. “In the darkness, she wound herself into the blanket still more tightly. She was swaddled, confined, protected from herself – as in a very exclusively privately run mental hospital devoted solely to the care of one person: Nola. She fell asleep bothered only by the nagging thought that she would have to start all over in the morning. Existence whined in her head like a mosquito. Then she swatted it. Rode the tide of her comfort down into the earth.”

— Louise Erdrich

234. “I’ve read that certain memories put down in agitation at a vulnerable age do not extinguish with time, but engrave ever deeper as they return and return.”

— Louise Erdrich

235. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever.”

— Louise Erdrich

236. “The beauty of the sensation was so intense that fear dropped away. It felt like a kind of birth. She opened her eyes. Sunlight through a foggy window. A green plant on a shelf. The dim delicious fall air. She was a new baby – skin frail as paper, arms weak as milk, brain forming shapes into thought.”

— Louise Erdrich

237. “Everything ceased. She listened hard. Nothing, nothing, nothing. But she could feel the calm breathing of the night. She put on her mother’s mitts, took the ax, stepped out the door. Outside, there was resounding silence. The black sky was a poem beyond meaning.”

— Louise Erdrich

238. “Thomas remembered something from his boarding-school days. There, he’d strategized. The only way to fight the righteous was to present an argument that would make giving him what he wanted seem the only righteous thing to do.”

— Louise Erdrich

239. “The black sky was a poem beyond meaning.”

— Louise Erdrich

240. “When he needed to calm his mind, he opened a book. Any book. He had never failed to feel refreshed, even if the book was no good.”

— Louise Erdrich

241. “Any power she owned lay in her feigned indifference.”

— Louise Erdrich

242. “And so when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I’ve done all the things they say. That’s not what gets them. What aggravates them is I’ve never shed one solitary tear. I’m not sorry. That’s unnatural. As we all know, a woman is supposed to cry.”

— Louise Erdrich

243. “Eddy tells me his book is basically an argument against suicide. Every page contains a reason not to kill yourself.”

— Louise Erdrich

244. “His generation would have to define themselves. Who was an Indian? What? Who, who, who? And how? How should being an Indian relate to this country that had conquered and was trying in every way possible to absorb them?”

— Louise Erdrich

245. “Or maybe there was a god. Mine is the god of isolation, the god of the small voice, the god of the little spirit, of the earthworm and the friendly mouse, the hummingbird, the greenbottle fly and all things iridescent.”

— Louise Erdrich

246. “The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling.”

— Louise Erdrich

247. “Wonder what?” “If one of them will ever say, Gee, those damn Indians might have had an idea or two. Shouldn’t have got rid of them all. Maybe we missed out.” Louis laughed. Thomas laughed. They laughed together at the idea.”

— Louise Erdrich

248. “Everyone seems to have within themselves a collection of poems.”

— Louise Erdrich

249. “They both started laughing in that desperate high-pitched way people laugh when their hearts are broken.”

— Louise Erdrich

250. “White double bloodroot and blue scilla covered yards on my path to the store. The leather knuckles of milkweed were pushing from the earth. Dark hemlocks and pine were tipped with tiny tender green needles. People wandered about like toddlers, bending over to look at last year’s dried grass. They watched the sky and examined the tags of newly planted city trees. And the air – it was a clean cold food.”

— Louise Erdrich